When the Student Is Ready
by Gabriel S. de Anda
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Antoine was finding it difficult to locate his “middle ground.” He did not do “middle” or “reasonable” very well, but this was, of course, no surprise to him. It was the principal reason that he was grossly overweight. It was not merely that he lived in a consumerist society, or in the richest nation on earth, or on the wealthiest planet in the Commonwealth. It was not just that he was essentially a viscerotonic body type prone towards adiposity, nor that he was orally oriented and loved the feel of foods of all textures in his mouth and the feel of a full stomach.
He was simply not good at drawing lines, at saying “when.” At various times in his life, he had engaged in amateur self-analysis, gleaning from the various pretzeled answers the catch-all lazy man’s moebius mantra: “That’s-just-who-I-am.”
He loved to eat. Was it a mask for some other disorder? Probably. Did he do it to compensate for a lack in other areas of his life? Undoubtedly. But after all the questions were asked and answered, he would jump up and land on the same spot.
“That’s just who I am.”
There are people who prefer fiction over non-fiction, prose over poetry, sour and bitter over sweet and savory, dark over light. Under stress or sorrow, some people forget to eat and whittle away. When Antoine found himself under the gun, he ate.
“That’s just who I am.”
Too much of a good thing? No such thing, Antoine was fond of saying.
But something new was happening. He began to acquire a clarity of mind that comes from fasting, which in an odd sense, he was doing. An exciting crystalline desperation, an almost existential ache caused by the mind’s temporary freedom from the baser demands of the flesh. And yet he could eat, and not only eat, but gorge himself on all the delicious, savory calorie-laden foods that had been the cause of his problems to begin with. Truly, he was having his cake and eating it, too.
When he’d left the UCLA clinic in mid-January, he’d weighed in at 305. By the end of April, three-and-a-half months later, he was 273.
It was a milestone and a cause for euphoria. For many years Antoine had engaged in daydreaming and wish-fulfillment fantasies, toggling through the pages of GQ on his iPad, or watching the handsome and chiseled cinema stars on his Wide View Virtual Cousin®, always with a moue of sadness, like when he would masturbate, a sense of envy and longing mingling with the feeling of a world quickly passing him by.
But after losing thirty-two pounds, the world was finally beginning to revolve again, albeit slowly. When he saw himself in reflections, he was amazed and delighted, even though in his dealings with people and the public, he still felt and acted like his former self: hermetic, isolated, alone. It would take time, no doubt. He would lose all the excess weight, he now understood, quite effortlessly, but the self-image he carried in his heart and mind would take a little longer to change.
As a fat man, Antoine had successfully kept his self-awareness on a leash. Being overweight had made him sartorially sloppy and careless. By the end of June he weighed 255, his clothes hanging loosely on him as if they were not really his. He could no longer ignore that he was truly changing, and a growing narcissistic hunger began to bloom after the longest of winters. People at work and in his life began commenting on how much better he looked, and while he still had eighty pounds to goal, the contrast was remarkable, and of course, remarked upon.
This depressed him a little, because it gave Antoine concrete evidence of how people had been seeing him all along, yet had, for the sake of decorum, simply not spoken their minds. He began to see the Antoine he had studiously avoided seeing for so long. He felt hurt and a little self-pitying and addressed the matter in the way he knew best.
For dinner he bought himself a Umami burger: lamb and oxtail patties on a ciabatta bun, Dijonnaise and crushed avocado and sharp cheddar cheese and fried green tomato and red leaf iceberg. In a fit of spitefulness, he ordered heartily salted chili cheese fries and a thick, strawberry malt.
He woke up the next morning feeling guilty, dry-mouthed and emotionally and physically polluted, and weighing a whole pound less than the day before.
He bought interim and serviceable clothes and started to dress nicer, comb his hair and cut his nails. He was a little hesitant to buy a whole new wardrobe just yet, partly because he was still quite a way from his goal of 175, but also because of a quiet, unspoken fear deep inside that somehow, he would wake up fat again. But the alterations his old clothes required were too drastic; none of the tailors he had approached would take on the job. “Sorry,” said one, “we fix clothes, not make new ones.”
* * *
During July on one of his monthly check-in dates with the UCLA clinic, Antoine ran into April again. His mind had been absorbed and distracted, and while he had failed to spot her, she recognized him, coming up to him and giving him an exclamatory hug.
“Wow! You look amazing,” she said. “Gosh. How much have you lost?”
“Oh. Uh, I find out. Today.” He shrugged. “I mean, I’m down to about 245. Or so.”
“Wow. How do you feel?” she asked, her eyes tracking his face like a police helicopter searchlight, making Antoine feel self-conscious and uncomfortable.
“Okay, I guess.” He laughed brokenly, suddenly happy to see her. “Do you have time? For a cappuccino? At the, uh, student café?”
“Oh. No, I can’t,” she said with an apologetic fluster, smiling up at him, “I’m on my way out. But how about dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yes.” Her smile spread like ink on newsprint drawing paper. “You do remember what that is, don’t you?”
Antoine chortled. “Of course.”
“Amazing,” she repeated sweetly, softly. They exchanged numbers and chose a tentative date. She gave him a kiss on the cheek when she left, and Antoine wondered why he had not tried to ask her out before.
It was the start of a friendship that morphed into a romance that seemed to Antoine as quick and as pleasantly unnatural as the weight loss program he was on.
The relationship boosted his confidence and tempered his moods, for there is nothing like pleasant, first-hand, direct experience, especially of the carnal variety, to win over the heart and mind. April had a bony, angular, boyish body and a cute face which grew cuter the longer Antoine dated her. She was flat-chested with nipples that, when excited, grew taut and hard like the nipples on a baby’s milk bottle. Antoine recalled a friend once saying that “the sweetest meat is closest to the bone.” Antoine found April very tasty.
By mid-October Antoine weighed 230, and his romantic involvement greatly streamlined his outlook, diluting his fears and inferiority complex to the point where he truly seemed like a different person. April brought out a charm in him that had hitherto been obscured and, as his confidence grew, he noticed that women, who would never have previously given him the time of day, were suddenly giving him the time of day. It was not exactly that they were irresistibly turned inside out or bowled head-over-heels by him, but people were drawn to something of the enthusiasm and charisma Antoine exuded, a growing brio that was making him feel like, yes, he was a Julian Schnabel, a Sebastian Hilary, a skinnier Orson Welles.
“Miga,” asked April one evening as they were finishing up dinner at her apartment, “what would you do if your name was Tibursio Pippireewishnee?”
Antoine scooped up a spoonful of French vanilla ice cream clotted with butterscotch and chocolate syrup and fresh raspberries, dusted with ground cinnamon and sugar, just like his mother used to serve him as a child. “I’d be the coolest Tibursio Pippireewishnee ever,” he murmured around a mouthful of the mélange.
“I envy the way you can eat,” she said, daintily nibbling at a sugary raspberry. April was fifteen pounds under what the weight tables for her height called for, but Antoine found her alluring and sexy. He was not sure, but it was his belief that the experimental Manna procedure was feeding his libido, bringing a glow to his body that even April had commented on.
Occasionally he would mentally dawdle, chewing the inside of his cheeks and lips, and ponder the continual and continuing transformations he was undergoing. Daily he was getting better and better acquainted with the new man in the mirror, and little by little forgetting the man he used to be. The heavy, droopy torpidity of his features had grown modeled with the loss of sixty-five pounds, and he recalled how he’d read an interview with a sculptor who’d said that when he chiseled the marble, he was merely chipping away at the stone that “did not belong,” trying to find the form already there, hidden within the coarse, quarried rock.
As the fat melted away, angles and bones that had been long obscured began making their presence known. Society has prejudices about such things. Fat, sloppy people are intuited as dullards and lowbrow. Beauty and thinness are seen as the true indicia of intelligence and a cultured sociability. As individuals, we know that these thoughts are specious, as apt to be false as they might be true. But as a collective, we believe this with the same knee-jerk spasming of prejudice that makes a fat man choose a three-topping slice of Brooklyn-style pizza over carrot sticks.
Without thinking about it, Antoine was slowly acquiring this same disdain.
By Christmas time, when April had returned to Cuernavaca to visit her family for the holidays, Antoine weighed 215 pounds and had a few weeks of bachelorhood to play with. Everything had moved so quickly, he had not had much of a chance to think certain things through, to catch his breath, to look around. A year earlier, he would have killed to have a girlfriend like April, but that was a year ago, when he was a man who weighed one hundred pounds more than he did now.
It was not that he thought he deserved better, not exactly. But he felt it unfair that April had cornered him when he was vulnerable, and he now wondered what it might be like to date other women. For a man to be truly happy, he thought, he must have lived a little and tasted the fruits of his desires in order to really know what he wants. How else to make meaningful, authentic choices? Antoine had had no time to savor the different fruits.
He began dating with a ferocity he had previously reserved only for cooking and eating and making rationalizations. After the New Year, when April had returned from her parent’s, he broke off their relationship. She was a little surprised but took it with considerable sangfroid, kissing him on the cheek tenderly as she had just before they’d become lovers, smiling wistfully, and, with the graciousness that had attracted her to him in the first place, wishing him luck in finding what it was he was looking for.
“I’m proud of you, Miga” she said. “No, really. The most important thing you can learn in life is when to stop.” She kissed the other cheek and bid him a fond adieu.
Having no experience in these matters, Antoine had been dreading the breakup, but now he felt cheated, chagrined and not a little confounded, the taste of ashes in his mouth. He felt that the balanced reasonableness of April’s reaction demonstrated in some way that what they had shared was somehow fallow and false, quite the opposite of kismet. Breaking up with her felt like the right thing to do.
* * *
“You’re beautiful,” said the woman sitting across from Antoine. She spoke it with a measure of shy awkwardness, and he gave her a cavalier smile. She believes in me, he thought. I’m her religion. He craved magic, aware of the magic his smile was capable of conjuring in the hearts of the susceptible. Believers in a cult of beauty.
He sized up his date. She had a very pretty face, although she was something of a heifer. Without memory or irony, something deep inside him crystallized the thought that fat was bad, and that he would never allow such a thing to happen to him. Again, another, deeper and quieter voice had to remind him.
He stared into the smoky mirrors that circled the restaurant club’s walls, reassuring himself. He was in Delicto, a downtown club he had been frequenting for almost a whole month now.
It was April, and the month’s name recalled the other April. As far as he knew she still worked at the UCLA hospital where he still went once a month for his weigh-ins, but he had neither seen nor heard from her since.
Throughout the Manna procedure, he had managed to tone down his overeating binges, except for the two months after he had broken off with April, which he found strange. Binge eating was something he always did when depressed, and he had not really felt depressed after the breakup, but rather light and exhilarated, titillated with the new freedom that matched the new body he was inhabiting.
In the three and a half months’ since he had last seen April, he had lost a little over 25 more pounds and had gone through about as many lovers. The speed and rapacity of his amorous adventures brought to the forefront a side of his character he, as well as friends and acquaintances, had been previously unfamiliar with. There seemed to be a Darwinist determinism — in both senses of the word — with which he burned though these flimsy, disposable relationships, very much akin to the way his body was burning through the fat calories, finding a chiseled pulchritude in cheek, chin and hip bones that had previously been obscured. A woman the other night had commented on his hands, on how delicate and beautiful they were. Glowing, she said, as if with an inner light, the hands of a pianist or an artist.
Antoine thought that the cellular recalibration had brought a certain light and flush to his face, to his skin, to his body, something that buoyed him and carried him above the grosser depths of everyday life. He felt like a male model from a Leni Rifenstahl movie, a daguerreotype Adonis.
He was at one of the plateaus he hit every now and then since starting the diet. He weighed in now at 190, about 15 or 20 pounds away from his goal, but he’d been at 190 now for two weeks. The weight loss would soon resume, it always did. At a healthy pace he would be done around the end of June or July, maybe August, close to two years since he had first answered the UCLA ad, about twenty-one months since he’d first met April.
He was still a pyknic. He had lost a lot of weight but, aside from his prodigious sexual athletics, he was not exercising much. His body was soft, cherubic, somewhat feminine, while his face had become that of a glowing, blond Coptic martyr from a Renaissance painting of oil on wood, diffuse and gold-leafed saintliness. Looking at his reflection, he recalled: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
But which was he? A student or a teacher? He stood and looked down at his date — what was her name? — and cupped her chin with his right hand, gently inserting his thumb into her mouth. She closed her eyes and smiled, purred while grasping his wrist with both her hands and tonguing his thumb with drunken lasciviousness.
There was only one way to find out.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Gabriel S. de Anda
